From the Ashes of the Arab Spring
Today marks 15 years since the overthrow of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali, one of the high points of the Arab Spring. The events of 2011 gave rise to an impressive wave of revolutions. Almost all were bloodily suppressed.
Demonstrators in front of the prime minister's offices in Tunis on January 27, 2011. (Fethi Belaid / AFP via Getty Images)
On January 14, 2011, Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced to resign, after four weeks of revolt in the north African country. It was a first major scalp for the wave of upheaval known as the Arab Spring — a democratic upsurge across the region, which, however, also ended in many defeats. In an interview for the Swiss website marx21.ch, scholar Gilbert Achcar reflects on the legacy of those years and the prospects of a resurgent revolutionary process today. The interview was conducted before the most recent uprising in Iran.
Jean Batou
It’s been fifteen years since the fall of the Ben Ali regime, representing the Arab Spring’s first major victory. After Tunisia, many other peoples launched mass struggles, notably in Egypt and Syria. Yet this impressive revolutionary wave was contained by bloody civil wars, fueled by foreign interventions (jihadist groups, Gulf states, Iran, Turkey, Russia, etc.), but also by repression from the existing states, leading to the reestablishment of authoritarian regimes. What is your assessment of this long period?
Gilbert Achcar
The balance sheet is very negative at present. The democratic regime in Tunisia, the last of the major democratic gains of the 2011 wave of uprisings, commonly known as the Arab Spring, was overthrown by an internal coup in 2021, ten years later. Popular resistance against the coup in Sudan, the last bastion of the 2019 revolutionary wave dubbed Second Arab Spring, was drowned out by the war that erupted in 2023 between two armed factions of the military regime. It was against this backdrop of defeats that Israel launched its genocidal war against the population of Gaza, as part of a dramatic escalation of the Zionist offensive against the Palestinian people and Israel’s regional enemies.
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